


Filibustero

by superblackmarket



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Character Study, M/M, history lesson, merle is offensive, see wikipedia for more
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-23
Updated: 2015-05-23
Packaged: 2018-03-31 19:17:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,309
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3989641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/superblackmarket/pseuds/superblackmarket
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Merle wants Daryl to stand up and take what he wants, but Daryl's always had his own way of doing things.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Filibustero

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fitofpique](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fitofpique/gifts).



> Forewarned is forearmed: this story is just an experiment in character writing. I think Merle is interesting, but I in no way endorse his prejudices - racist, homophobic or otherwise. Absolutely no offense is intended. 
> 
> And on that note, this cheery little gem is for fitofpique.

There was only one kind of historical personage Merle had any respect for: the guys who went in and took what they wanted. Them folks in Jamestown, the ones what sailed in on the  _Mayflower –_ damn right they sent the Injuns scampering. Knocked down the tipis, buttressed up their forts. Way he saw it, a man had a right to anything he could take. That was the beauty of the good ol’ U-S-of-fucking-A.

Andrew Jackson – now he was an American hero. Booted the Cherokee outta Georgia, sent them kicking and screaming on their way so enterprising white settlers and generations of Dixons past could gobble up the land and put down their own roots.

Baby brother, though, he was a bleeding heart and in another life might’ve been a liberal. Merle used to catch him playing with a couple Cherokee brats when he was a kid, and he’d whup baby bro’s ass to teach him a lesson all the while scratching his head at how there was any Injuns left round these parts. Once Removed, always Removed, what did they think they was doing back here, anyway? Civilized Tribes my ass, he told baby brother, who probly went straight back to his savage little friends after Merle got sent to juvie.

He had his work cut out with baby bro. Little shit was all kinds of colorblind and tone-deaf. Once he caught him mucking in the dirt with a little black kid from the other side of town, and he gave the kid a clout round the ears to teach him good. Next day, what did he find but baby bro _apologizing_ to the kid, apologizing for _Merle._ Now that, that couldn’t fucking stand and if he had to knock out a couple of bro’s baby teeth to make himself clear, so be it. Little bro had to unnerstand, consorting with lesser folks was only holding him back from taking what was rightfully his.

“An’ what’s that?” little bro said drily. He had a way of arching his brow and curling his lip that made him look droll beyond his years.

“Anything you want, baby,” Merle insisted.

Bro’s face spasmed. He wasn’t acquisitive, he just wanted what had been taken from him. His momma, gone up like a Roman Candle. Hell, his whole fucken childhood. And Merle couldn’t give him that, much as he wanted to. So he toughened him up instead, til he was sure that if he got aggression, little bro would give it two times back.

Baby brother was still going to school regular then, getting his head stuffed with booklearning. Merle found him sprawled on the porch, a big ol’ textbook in his lap. “What’s that you got?” he said, starting to roll a joint.

“World history,” baby bro said.

“Whatchoo need that for?” Merle said critically.

“’S alright,” said baby bro, turning a page. He was pretty as a picture, baby brother, all gold an’ bronze in the sunlight. Plenty rough round the edges, getting a reputation as a tough, but still too pretty for Merle’s peace of mind.

“What’s that? Africa?” Merle said.

“South America,” baby said. “Gotta write an essay on this guy William Walker.”

“Who?”

“Some dude in the 1800s. Built up his own private army and tried ta colonize parts of Latin America. ’S called filibustering.”

“What is?”

“Goin inta foreign countries, like all on your own without yer government or nobody’s permission, takin it over, and puttin yerself in charge.”

That sounded pretty damn fine to Merle. “An’ that’s what he did, this Walker fella?”

“Yep.” Baby brother accepted the joint when it was offered and took an expert hit just like Merle taught him. “First in Mexico, an’ then mostly Nicaragua, where he set himself up as president.”

“What happened to ‘im?”

“Firing squad. Pissed off too many people.”

“Still, what a way to go,” sighed Merle. He could picture himself on horseback, wide-brimmed hat, long-barreled pistol in each hand, shooting up the natives and riding into the capital like a conquering hero.

“Conquistador,” little bro supplied helpfully. He was picking up Spanish for reasons best known to himself; Merle sure as hell didn’t see the point of learning bean-speak if you wasn’t a beaner living in beantown. And ’sides, if you was gonna shoot up a place and name it after yourself, bastards better be learning English pretty quick.

“Hmm…” Merle was pleasantly high now. “You like this history stuff, baby?”

“Some of it.” Baby took his beer, sweating condensation in the heat, and pressed it against his forehead. “Wouldn’t mind seein Nicaragua an’ some a’them places.”

“Set yourself up as king?” Merle swiped the beer and drained it, chucked the can at baby’s head. He caught it neatly; baby had the reflexes of a cat.

“Nah,” bro said. “Just to see it, explore some.”

“Faggot,” Merle told him. “I’d be king.”

Little brother went back to his book. He was too passive, Merle thought. What kinda pussy just goes _exploring_ if he has the option of _taking_ , claiming and making over in his own image? If he had his way, Merle would see himself reflected in every pair of eyeballs from here to Timbuktu, his face on every dollar bill.

Brother surely needed another lesson, but the afternoon sat too heavy and humid for a scrap in the dirt. It was probably even hotter down where he wanted to travel.

“Aintcha happy here?” Merle asked at last, too lazy to rouse himself for another beer. “Ya aint gotta hitch down to fucken Nick-are-agh-yew-uh for a drop a’liquor or a nice evening in the moonshine still.”

Baby shrugged.

“What then? Whatcha wishin for?”

“Oh plenty.” Baby bro rolled his eyes. “Wish I was drunk in Havana. Wish I was at the mardi gras. Wish I had me two pretty ladies ta make me feel real good. Christ, Merle.”

“Spoken like-” Merle belched. “What didja say his name was?”

“William Walker.”

“Walker, a true - ?”

“Filibuster.”

Merle let his eyelids droop. “Filibuster,” he mumbled, lulled by the low hum of the cicadas, the dull whine of the mosquitos.

He didn’t forget about it though, the whole filibustering thing, after he lit out for good. Riding his bike, a murderous Bonneville-Triumph Frankenstein, amidst the roar of a dozen other engines, felt like being in some mercenary army, if only there was more territory to claim beyond the long arm of the law.

“Walker’s Army,” he told baby brother when he came home for a spell to get the china white outta his system.

“What?” Baby was tense, more wild and skittish than Merle had ever seen him. Moved almost silently now, like a ghost, you wouldn’t know he was in the room with ya til he up and said something.

The old man was passed out drunk in front of the television, a shiny bloated slug, and didn’t hardly register that Merle was back.

“He leavin you be?” Merle said, confident he’d borne the brunt of it, knocked most of the violence outta senior before he left home.

Baby shrugged, nodded. His shoulders were broadening out nicely, Merle was glad to see, but his waist was still narrow as a lady’s and he had that beautiful face what seemed to say _come hither_ even when he was giving you his filthiest scowl. It was too – what was the fucken word? – _androgynous._ Too fluid, too boy-girl girl-boy.

They went hunting just like old times. Damned if baby wasn’t a better tracker than him these days, though he’d never admit it to him.

“Ready to ride with me?” he asked.

“An’ join William Walker’s gringo army?” Little bro snorted. “Nah, got three years ta go, even if the old man don’t know no different. Wanna get my diploma.”

Merle, senior year he got suspended and never bothered to come back again. He reckoned it was alright if little brother did. He was always the sweet one, let him be the smart one too. And if he was honest with himself, Merle wasn’t prepared to expose baby bro and baby bro’s pretty lil face to his ravenous gang of bikers. It’d be like Christmas morning for them.

So he detoxed and took off again, ready to raise hell and cultivate a new meth habit. Put baby out of his head as much as he could, didn’t brood that senior mighta forgot the lesson Merle taught him, and focused instead on burning miles and getting loaded. If that wasn’t filibustering, he didn’t know what was.

Not two years later he was standing in a sterile Atlanta hospital, out of place in his black leathers and heavy boots, staring down at baby brother. Baby weren’t so pretty anymore. Not with the right side of his face smashed to smithereens, his arm in a sling, tubes coming outta his nose. Said he’d been jumped, voice hazy on the morphine running through his veins. Merle smelt the lie, he always knew when bro was lying, but his brain snapped shut like a steel trap and wouldn’t let him think the fatal thoughts (thoughts that he’d miscalculated, thoughts that he’d been negligent, thoughts that he’d abandoned his brother to something worse than he ever imagined, thoughts that _senior did this to ya, didn’t he_?) and he nodded sympathetically. _Damn, them bastards got ya good._

Nah, not pretty at all now. His face would never be symmetrical again. Give him a few years hard living, pack some booze round that tiny little waist, ink him up, and he’d look a lot like Merle.

“’ll go with you,” baby mumbled, high as a fucken kite. “Soon as’m outta here…”

“That’s right,” Merle told him. “You’ll be livin the good life afore you know it, baby. You wanna see the world? I’ll have you filibusterin ten hot little bitches a day like they was the last frontier. Jus’ you wait, you’ll be ridin outta here like yer man Walker on a Bonneville.”

Baby nodded slightly, his good eye fluttering shut. “You get me outta here, M’rl, aint no musket ball or cannon shot can lay me down.”

Merle kept his word. Soon as bro got discharged, all operated and stitched and mended, big blue eyes narrowed to a permanent squint, Merle swept him up. As far as running away from home went, it weren’t nuthin too drastic, him just a couple months shy of eighteen.

The beating had left him good and rabid, which was just the way Merle wanted him. Mean, volatile, slavering at the mouth. Primed to take and claim what was his and what shoulda been his. If life wasn’t quite what he imagined (eatin good and drinkin fine wine, pretty ladies at the mardi gras), he made do with what it was (wild game and Jack, methed-out whores Merle never saw him touch, nor anyone else for that matter) and remade himself in Merle’s image.

Baby bro was a filibuster, all right.

 

xxx

 

Daryl did stake out his territory eventually, diligent as a cartographer, just not in any way Merle could’ve imagined. When Rick stared at him longer than he should’ve, Daryl held his gaze and they locked into a shared hypnosis. When the moment ended he felt shuffled, like a deck of cards put back in a slightly different order. His arms broke out in gooseflesh. He was cold, so cold he burned hot.

He crept in to Rick’s cell sometime after midnight. Sat at the foot of the bunk. Waited for Rick to go through the motions of waking up though he knew the man hadn’t been sleeping.

“So how do we do it?” he said. Meaning, _I’ve never done it before._

A parade of shock, hope, wonder and hunger crossed Rick’s face before his features relaxed into gentleness. Saying, _I know you haven’t_ and _I’m glad you chose me._

_Like there was ever anyone else_ , he said, then added aloud, “I need you to show me.”

“This is new to me too,” Rick said. “Guess we just… explore. If you like it we’ll see what happens.”

He shrugged out of his shirt and Daryl followed suit, eyes narrowed. Trying not to overthink. He pressed his palm flat against Rick’s chest, feeling the heart pumping underneath. Within seconds Rick’s heart sped up and his breathing came fast and shallow. Fascinated, Daryl smoothed his hand over Rick’s belly and felt the muscles jump under his fingers.

Rick made to follow suit but Daryl shook his head, still transfixed by the effect he was having. _Just let me do this, okay?_

He scooted forward so he could reach round to feel the knobs of his spine, the way his shoulder blades glided under his skin. Then back up to the shoulders, where Rick carried his responsibilities. Daryl kneaded his fingers into the knots he found there and was rewarded with a low groan. It amazed him, how every touch elicited some kind of direct response. He was intrigued with the way Rick’s hips looked, outlined against his jeans. Hooking his forefinger around a belt loop, he raised his eyebrows. Rick nodded.

Once all the unzipping and pulling and tugging was over, he had a lot more territory to contend with. The angles mesmerized him, hip to groin to thigh. The colors, too, the subtle gradations of flesh tone, the pulsing purple vein on the underside of Rick’s cock. His hands hovered over Rick’s thighs, steady as a surgeon’s.

Daryl had always been tactile, and for once he didn’t need permission to go filibustering.

He traced the line of Rick’s hip and turned him on his side so he could chart a course over his tailbone to the curve of his ass. Next he nudged his way up the rungs of his ribcage, feeling the heart contained within beating its wings like a wild bird in a cage. He bit down on a nipple so he could watch it flush a deep rosy pink.

And all the while Rick watched him, pupils so enormous they eclipsed the blue, and bunched the sheet into his fists with the effort of holding still. Daryl could feel his whole body quivering.

Huddling on a narrow bunk inside a prison at the end of the world, it was the most adventurous Daryl had felt in years. _C’mon, what’s one more mile? Just round this bend. You ever seen this crick afore? Let’s find out what’s on the other side._

He crouched between Rick’s legs to caress the sensitive globes of his balls, which clenched upwards under his touch. Rick’s whole body was vibrating with seismic tremors by the time Daryl placed his fingertip on that thick, purple vein and followed it up to the crown, where a drop of pearly precum glistened in the candlelight. He stretched out his tongue and tasted it. Bitter, briny, like he imagined the sea. He had just fisted the base of Rick’s cock and squeezed experimentally when he felt the hard flesh convulse and suddenly Rick was muffling a shout into the pillow and coming all over his stomach.

Daryl watched, awestruck. _He_ had made Rick do that. None of it squared with the mechanics Merle had versed him in as a kid, _that goes in here and then that goes in there_ – he’d hardly done anything, not in the traditional sense. It had just been a bit of exploring, mapping out the terrain, yet somehow he’d undone the strongest man he knew, left him panting and quivering and mopping his belly with shaking hands.

“That was – extraordinary,” Rick murmured, heavy-lidded. “You. Everything about you, never been anyone like you, nobody else could have-”

He’d felt like a conduit, transferring his own burning coldness to Rick and watching it transform into pure heat as it sank into the other man’s skin.

Now he rested his forehead in the crook between Rick’s neck and shoulder, the skin cool and damp with exertion. He liked the feel of Rick’s body under his, how neatly they aligned.

“Daryl,” Rick whispered a few minutes later. “You’re hard.”

He shifted slightly against Rick’s leg, breath hitching at the hint of friction along his cock. Somehow he hadn’t been expecting it, couldn’t pinpoint the moment when arousal, so powerful and insistent, crept up on him. And he accepted it, rearing back and shimmying out of his pants. Too rapt, too spellbound by what his body was doing to register any self-consciousness.

They were entering the tropic of no return. A mess of spit and slick, a finger apiece inside of Rick, Daryl hovering over him. Then the moment itself, when Daryl slid inside Rick, going where he had never gone before. They stared at each other in astonishment, settling into the wondrous intimacy of joining together.

After that, the sex part came easy, natural. Fucking Rick was nothing like conquest. It had a sweet simple glory and they both basked in the afterglow.

“You look radiant,” Rick said.

“Shaddup.” Daryl cuffed him gently, still half-sprawled across his chest.

“Was it alright?” Rick asked, suddenly anxious even though Daryl’s cum was still leaking out of his ass. “Are you glad you – with me –?”

Daryl smirked, and felt his mouth curving into a real smile in spite of himself. “Might wanna try it again sometime,” he said, and allowed himself to be held tightly.

 

xxx

 

When he and baby brother squared off in the Governor’s arena, Pandemonium howling around them, the first thought what popped into his head was that baby was _beautiful_ again. Lean and corded with muscle, skin stretched tight over high cheekbones, eyes ablaze in his narrow face, he was deadly and breathtaking like a fallen angel.

He didn’t understand what put the conviction in his step, the blaze in his eyes, not til after their brief and ill-tempered sojourn in the woods, which baby bro had put an end to by announcing, all high an’ mighty, that he was going _back where he belonged._

Back just in time to put an arrow through the biter that was about to make a meal outta Officer Friendly. Merle wouldn’t have begrudged the biter his supper, but Darlena was taking em out bolt by bolt, spinning from biter to biter with lethal agility til Merle reluctantly unleashed his bayonet and helped take out the rest.

Oh he saw it alright, he saw the look that passed between them when it was over. The gratitude, respect, solidarity, and something else that made his blood boil over when his bro gave Grimes a tiny nod.

Suddenly he was wishing baby still had that thickness round his middle, the nasty squint obscuring the color of his eyes. Maybe if he didn’t move so gracefully, didn’t carry himself with that newfound confidence of his, maybe Grimes wouldn’t be looking at Darlena like he trusted him, relied on him. Grimes had no business relying on Merle’s brother for _nuthin_ , and he certainly had no right to look at him like he loved him. Bro must be out of his mind to look back. Somewhere in the past year and a half everything had gone tits up, and he wasn’t just talking about the biters.

_I just want my brother back_ , little bro said, but awash in bitterness and jealousy Merle lashed back with jibes about the size of his balls. He was up the wall, tearing through old mattresses for hidden drugs while bro and Officer Friendly were off filibustering each other somewhere.

I got my work cut out for me, Merle thought, afore I lay my burden down.

_I aint gonna beg_ , he told the Governor not long after, his work suddenly done. A chance for baby bro and the others, bought with his life. Baby was still breathing and _hell,_ he thought, waiting for the end, _least I was an immortal in William Walker’s gringo army._   

**Author's Note:**

> Your feedback delights me. As always, I would love to hear your thoughts!


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